The Story of the Massacre
To view a stage production of the Sand Creek Massacre, please click here.
Flesh and bone littered the banks of Sand Creek on November 30, 1864. The previous day some 700 Colorado and New Mexico militiamen had routed a village of Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians, killing an estimated 150. As many as 100 of the dead were women and children; two were unarmed chiefs in their 70s, mowed down as they chanted their death songs. Dozens of corpses were left in the field, to be ravaged by vultures, coyotes, and trophy hunters. A month after the battle (three days after Christmas 1864), a rope strung with 100 Sand Creek scalps (or so it was claimed) graced the stage of a glitzy Denver theater. Bones still lay at the site three years later, when a team of Army doctors came to harvest them for a study on the physiological effects of bullet wounds.
Such grisly evidence has long since vanished, but the litter of death remains at Sand Creek. A mile-long gash of war garbage—bullet casings, shrapnel fragments, camp gear, riding tack, brass buttons worked loose from the soldiers' fatigues—mars the landscape, marking the scene of that destructive day 133 years ago (at this writing). But this symbolic scar is not where it's supposed to be—at least, not where history said it was. The ground long recognized as the massacre site—the place marked by a stone monument since the 1930s—lies barren, nary a spent shell nor ration tin to be found.
The tragedy actually unfolded almost two miles away, on a quiet patch of land that has gone unnoticed since the devastation it witnessed. It was identified as the true battleground in May 1999 after an intensive five-year search involving the National Park Service, the State of Colorado, and three separate tribal entities.
Did history simply make a mistake? Or was the site of the Sand Creek massacre lost on purpose, deliberately forgotten, willed out of existence like a badly dated wardrobe or a disgraced cousin?
How did this sad memory elude us for so long? Is it that we couldn't find the real Sand Creek? Or that we didn't want to?
The Sand Creek massacre is one of the few engagements ever formally disavowed by the U.S. military. Ulysses S. Grant himself denounced it as pure murder, while the Army's ranking jurist, Gen. Joseph Holt, termed it "a cowardly and cold-blooded slaughter, sufficient to cover its perpetrators with indelible infamy and the face of every American with shame and indignation."
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